Waste

"The waste in  Medicare and Medicaid...", a phrase often chanted by those on the Right and the Left when budgets are debated by the U.S. Congress. What waste? As a subscriber to Medicare, I get a written statement in the mail whenever I access Medicare-paid services. It is an accurate accounting sheet on what has been purchased on my behalf by Medicare. It shows what was billed by the medical provider, usually an outlandishly inflated amount, and what Medicare actually paid out, a much more reasonable amount. The statement I receive also encourages me to report unauthorized services or abuse. The waste, as I see it in black and white on these balance sheets is not on the part of Medicare. It is the wasteful and unrelenting attempts to cheat Medicare by greedy medical providers.

Let's talk about waste. The military cost of the "minor" intervention in Libya is estimated now at $550 million. It is speculated that it may climb to $800 million. Since 2001, the U.S. has given over $20 billion to Pakistan, a country which executes people for blasphemy. Then there's the $19 million we gave in military assistance to Bahrain in 2010. That military assistance in the form of military technology and hardware has been used to massacre democratic protesters. Then there's the additional $130 billion dollars the U.S. government spent in Afghanistan and Iraq last year on top of the $533 billion annual Pentagon budget.

Let's talk about waste. The U.S. farm subsidies in 2009 were $15.4 billion. Much of this money goes to growing environmentally degrading corn by big agricultural corporations, who then use that corn to produce ethanol for gasoline dilution and food which has low nutritional value, linked to obesity, diabetes and cancer. In 2005, the U.S. government paid $25 billion for medical research and development, much of which funds the development of drugs and procedures which then make nearly ten times that amount in profits for pharmaceutical manufacturers and hospitals. The government doesn't get a piece of those profits. Instead, it ends up being billed through Medicare and Medicaid for providing those products to the taxpayer who already paid for the research and development of those products.

Let's summarize: 

It is wasteful to carefully pay out taxpayer money, which they have contributed to in an insurance plan (Medicare), to provide for their health and well being. 

It is not wasteful to

• try to blow up dictators whom you have propped up and armed previously
• support the elite of a country which executes people for blasphemy
• help a king massacre unarmed, democracy-seeking demonstrators
• promote a war of aggression against two countries in the name of promoting U.S. values
• subsidize bad food and the gasoline-production industry
• fund medical research which is then packaged and resold to taxpayers for outrageous profits

The real waste in America is the wasted voting power of Americans who do not pay attention to what their government is doing, rather than what it is saying in its corporately controlled media.